But what about closer to home? What kind of medical help does Israel provide to Palestinian Arabs?

The medical help that Palestinian leaders get from Israeli hospitals is an open secret, not the least because of the irony of these Arab leaders accusing the Jewish state of all manner of war crimes and apartheid -- all while availing themselves of those medical facilities.

For example, Hamas terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh has never been shy about getting Israeli medical care for his family:

“Up until September 2000, a Ramallah resident could have taken his car and driven to Ichilov Hospital [in Israel],” began Commander of Judea and Samaria Division, Brig. Gen. Nitzan Alon [speaking in 2010]. “But from September 2000 we’ve been in a state of terror. Hundreds were killed, Jews and Palestinians alike. The battles took place in the heart of the cities, in places where enemies stood side by side with civilians, with difficult conditions and limited ability to evacuate. We could not practice medicine beyond the minimum. In those days, we were on the verge of a humanitarian crisis.”

But today, he says, the situation is different. Thanks to many efforts on both sides, stability has been restored. “The political leadership is able to make decisions not in the context of buses exploding. And now, along with direct military activity – patrolling, arrests, crossings – we are starting a new kind of routine. Medicine is an integral part of it. In today’s reality, we are obligated to do a lot more than the minimum. Our addressing of the situation should be as wide ranging as possible,” said Brig. Gen. Alon.

Sick Palestinians need to see a local doctor, who will refer them to a specialist, who then may ask to send them for treatment in Israel. From there, the Palestinian Authority Health Office will need to authorize it, get a permit from an Israeli coordination officer, find the right hospital, and send a commitment to pay the bill. This process alone can take weeks or even months.

That bill is being paid, at least in part, by the Palestinian Authority. The PA prefers that their people (though not their leaders) get their medical care in the hospitals available in the West Bank and Gaza. Besides the expense of superior care, there is the issue of the PA paying money to Israel, which they do whether the patient is from the West Bank or Gaza. For a time in 2009, the PA stopped paying the Israeli hospitals altogether.

An example given by Dr. Weintraub, of Hadassah, in 2009, for cancer care is that “it costs between $50,000 and $100,000 here. It costs four times that in the U.S.”

One source of subsidies is The Peres Center for Peace, which sponsors care for 1,000 Palestinian children each year in Israeli hospitals and provides training for 40 Palestinian doctors.

This medical aid and hospitalization is provided despite an atmosphere of mistrust from the Palestinian patients and potential mistrust from their neighbors for having availed themselves of medical assistance from 'the Zionist state'.

And this medical aid is provided while some in Gaza think that Israel owes them that medical care because of the embargo, ignoring the actions taken by the Hamas terrorists which have made that embargo necessary.

The fact remains that while Israeli medical assistance is most noticed when it is being offered in far away places in friendly countries, it is also available to those with no love for Israel, some of whom continue to wish for it's destruction.

And it is those latter cases of assistance that do not get the big headlines.

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French children's magazine Youpi published this in its latest edition. The translation is "We call these 197 countries state...

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Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون

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